Donald Judd lived here

WEEK 34

At the corner of Spring and Mercer Streets in Soho stands a (now) gorgeously restored five-story cast iron building, painted a deep shade of gray-blue. A peek inside the massive street-level windows reveals hard-wood floors worn in spots, a preserved tin ceiling, Donald Judd rectangular metal “wall units” hung three in a row, and a few Alvar Aalto chairs and low tables.

This is the former home of Donald Judd at 101 Spring Street, which I learned about a few years ago when a friend who was visiting us in New York dropped his bag at our apartment and headed immediately to his long-scheduled tour of the property. Sad as it sounds, it’s taken me all this time to do the same.

This past Saturday, Irena and I joined six others on an artist-guided tour, the only way the Donald Judd Foundation (as it’s known today) allows visitors. Judd purchased the entire building in 1968 and moved in with his then-wife and infant son. What were they thinking? The building was in complete disrepair, Soho was – according to all I’ve read and learned — a wasteland. I imagined the pioneering Judds living like squatters in their new home, with minimal heat, among now-priceless art and tossing their trash in nearby dumpsters.

I’ve never been inside the home of an artist of Judd’s caliber – nor an artist of my lifetime. During the tour, our guide spoke in present tense about Judd and his wife and children (their daughter was born in 1970). As I walked the space, admiring the family’s furniture, appliances, utensils, meat slicer, books and so much phenomenal artwork, I convinced myself they were out of town and planning to return next week. The truth is, Judd and the kids moved to Marfa, Texas in the mid-1970s after he and his wife divorced, although they spent time at 101 Spring when Judd was working in New York, and then moved back in the 1980s when the kids were teenagers. As our guide explained, after Judd passed away in 1994, his homes were meant to be left as they were at that moment. Space oddly frozen in time and lived in.

My relationship with Judd dates to Modern Art History classes in college, with a great appreciation for his three-dimensional pieces. Although he began in his early years making traditional drawings and paintings, he quickly shifted to work in three-dimensions. He never referred to his works as sculpture (“specific objects” he called them), and as we learned during our visit, the placement of a work of art was as important to its understanding as the work itself, a concept he coined permanent installation.

It is the beauty of the space itself and Judd’s vocabulary of form that I found most wonderful about 101 Spring Street. While no photography is allowed, a quick online search brings up many articles and images. I loved learning about how the building itself influenced Judd – it was one of his first opportunities to experiment with architectural scale and things like light, materials and texture. Several of his choices matched our aesthetic.

As the visit unfolds across the five floors, you experience how this artist family lived and how the artist himself experimented. One of the coolest facts of the tour is that everything you see – all the art and elements – remain as Judd installed them originally.

The family’s main living space occupied the second floor with Judd’s own wooden furniture and built-ins. It was surprising to find an industrial stove and stainless-steel dishwasher – completely unheard of at the time — but likely something the family picked up a few blocks away at the restaurant supply stores, which still exist, on Bowery.

Judd used the third floor for his studio, a phenomenal space enveloped by dusty-peach-colored plaster walls and ceiling – completely integrated so it appeared to be one folded plane. Because most of his fabrication was done off-site, the studio became a place for reflection and contemplation. To that end, in the center of the space, he installed two massive metal floor pieces (and I mean massive) shortly after moving in. We learned that it was incredibly important for him to work and create in the presence of his own installations, to walk around them and be with them as a form of inspiration. I found that fascinating.

The family slept (all of them) on the fifth floor. Two things strike you when you enter the space. First is the very simple, low bed platform in the center of the floor, a sort of island with a mattress and white linens. Second is a wall-to-wall Dan Flavin fluorescent light installation that mirrors the cast-iron windows and gives the room a purple orange glow when illuminated. Judd had also designed little sleeping lofts for the kids and the most exquisite stainless-steel basins and fixtures in the two bathrooms at the far end of the floor. There is a fantastic archival photo of the kids and their mom hanging out on the platform bed in the early 70s, watching a tiny TV.

During and after the visit, my mind kept going to the children. The guide spoke about them frequently, how the rooms were filled with their toys, which is a wild concept when you realize they played among works by Claus Oldenburg and Frank Stella along with Aalto furniture, Rietveld zig-zag chairs, not to mention all of Judd’s own creations.

As I walked home that afternoon, a quiet snow falling on Soho, it occurred to me that Judd’s son and I are the same age, and spent the first few years of our respective lives only five miles apart in Manhattan. There he was in 1969, around a year old, sitting on his parents’ platform bed in the middle of a raw Soho loft, while I was being pushed in a stroller along West End Avenue and 76^th Street. Our experiences and families couldn’t have been more different, yet we started and ended our day essentially breathing the same air. Manhattan island compatriots, worlds away.